Horror, as a genre, is marked by the creative use of suspense and fear by authors and filmmakers to keep their audience invested until the story’s inevitable, and often jarring climax. Paul Tremblay’s novel, A Head Full of Ghosts, accomplishes this with varying degrees of success throughout the story’s progression.
Intended to be read as a standalone book, A Head Full of Ghosts features the Barretts, a relatively standard middle class family living in a period of economic downturn, where the divide between the rich and poor grows steadily. Within the Barrett family are John and Sarah, the parents, Marjorie, the eldest daughter, and Meredith, the youngest daughter and protagonist, who also plays the role of the narrator as she illustrates the events of the story both as a child and an adult. Meredith, often referred to as Merry, details in the beginning her family’s increasingly desperate financial situation. Her father is unable to find work, and her mother struggles to provide for the entire family on her own. New, and even direr problems arise for the Barretts when Marjorie, Merry’s usually cheerful and dependable older sister, begins behaving erratically, drawing the concern of the entire family. Her condition worsens, causing the family to seek the aid of a psychiatrist. John, however, believes Marjorie to be possessed by a demon, and that the family should enlist the help of the priest at their local church. This causes Sarah to rebuke him, arguing that Marjorie needs medical, not divine intervention. Marjorie’s mental state only continues in its downward spiral, along with the family’s financial situation, as her parents frantically spend their already dwindling funds in hopes of helping their daughter recover. Eventually, however, a TV station, hearing of the Barretts’ plight, proposes to create a TV show centered around Marjorie and her supposed possession, offering the family hefty monetary compensation in return. From the point the show first airs, the Barretts’ life is then truly turned on its head, with new adversities compounding upon the family’s already difficult situation relentlessly. As the events of the story continue to unravel, unspeakable catastrophe strikes the Barrett household, leaving a young Merry changed forever.
As a horror story, the novel has both its strengths and weaknesses. An example of the former is in the enticing themes that Tremblay presented in his novel. Two noteworthy examples were the idea of the extreme danger that lies in religious fanaticism, as well as the enduring battle between religion and science. These themes, though containing great potential, were neglected in many sections of the book. Such sections, mostly lacking purpose but to act as an arduous description of the characters’ everyday lives, made up a far larger portion of the novel’s writing than they should have. Had the author instead replaced such pieces of the writing with more meaningful dialogue and text based on the already established themes, the book would have been far more thought provoking, possibly leaving the reader asking questions about themselves and the real world. Another lacking aspect of the story was in one of its characters, Marjorie. Marjorie, Merry’s older sister who suffers from severe mental illness, was often written in a way that made her flat, and more resembling a side character as opposed to a central figure in the story. The story often used Marjorie’s terrible condition as a means of attempting to instill fear into the reader. This was initially accomplished with great success in the book’s beginning, where Marjorie’s dialogue was both subtle and effective in creating a sense of dread and fear within the reader at the thought of being forced to helplessly watch Marjorie’s descent from Merry’s caring sister to something unimaginably worse. This initial momentum, however, was quickly lost in later chapters, where Marjorie’s words in describing her own suffering became unconvincing and even cliche at times. Such dialogue made up the majority of Marjorie’s presence in the book, making it so that her character as a whole was not nearly effective enough to rouse fear and terror in the reader. These flaws in Marjorie’s character also presented a much larger problem to the story as a whole. This is owed to Marjorie’s character being perhaps the sole aspect of the story that made it horror. But because of how she was written in a way that mostly failed to create that horror, the entire story suffered as a result. The novel contained a few other aspects that could be deemed as negative, but were not nearly as detrimental as the needlessly long sections of writing and the flaws of Marjorie’s character. There were, however, some redeeming traits in the book. The beginning of the story, for instance, was excellent in providing a baseline for the events that were to follow. It was also successful in creating the fear necessary for a literary work of the horror genre, though this solid foundation was somewhat undone by the monotony of the writing that followed it. The concluding portions of the story were also quite enjoyable, because they presented the climax in a manner that had the potential to instill fear in the reader. The final twist’s reveal was another positive trait of the story, achieved through having an adult Merry come to the realization herself in tandem with the reader. Through this, the story was able to truly deliver the impact of its twist.
To finalize, the book, taking into account both its various flaws and strengths earns a rating of 2 out of 5 stars. The bulk of the novel was simply too tedious to properly tell a horror story, though it did have some aspects that prevented it from being irredeemable. Due to this, A Head Full of Ghosts would not be a good choice for a reader looking to delve into the horror genre. If the author were to revisit this book, however, and focus on the areas of key importance, it certainly has the potential to become a fantastic horror novel.
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